BED (Bondage Expo Dallas) is a special event for us. We’ve been involved with BED right from the very beginning and have been a part of it every year since. We count the BED organisers as friends and their hospitality has lead to us having the feeling of coming home when we head to BED. I know I say that every year but we feel that every year. If there’s one thing I’d change I’d like to have more time to hang out after the event than we had this year. Sadly vacation time is limited and we had to leave the day after the event. Much tears and sad goodbyes. Thursday We were met at the airport by TwistedCupcake and taken straight to the hotel. Due to our flight times it was the first time we hadn’t stayed with Dallas Kink and Cat Nawashi before the conference, it felt weird not to be going out to Cedars first. When we arrived at the hotel people were already arriving for the BED and we immediately saw some familiar faces. After getting checked in and unpacking our gear I hung out in the lobby for a while catching up with a few people. Thursday evenings main attraction is the FOREplay part at The Nines in Deep Ellum. There were performances by Parker RopeBoi who did self suspension. Olivia Lyon & LOON whom I remember actually fell off the stage, and a kind of muses of kinbaku themed performance by Kissmedeadlydoll, Fuoco & Mildred S. Pierce. There was also a lot of tying on the roof once BED’s heroic staff members had brought and set up some portable suspension frames. There was also plenty of socialising and [...]

We were very happy to be invited back to BeachBind and we were very much looking forward to it. This is really a unique event taking place over a full week at a beautiful inclusive resort in Jamaica (Hedonism II). The atmosphere and the setting are incredible and the pace of the event is just perfect.

It was wonderful to be back in Tokyo again. We’ve been to Japan a few times and really enjoy it. We were excited but relaxed as we made our way from Narita airport to our accommodation. We like using AirBnB rather than hotels so we can have a private space where we can leave our stuff and relax. Also we buy our own food and eat out a lot more allowing us to experience more of Japan.

Tokyo Japan in March 2016. The weather find, the cherry blossoms beginning to bloom. My memory of these events is at one and the same time vivid but probably incomplete due to the time elapsed since the trip and the killer jet lag that plagued me on the trip. If one thing all our travelling has taught me it's new strategies for dealing with jet lag and the importance of scheduling to account for it. I can't even begin to say how excited we were for this trip. We were going to see Yukimura Sensei and learn his style of kinbaku a little more. It was therefore with great sadness we learned of his passing the week before we were due to arrive. Yukimura Haruki is irreplaceable. So we didn't even think of getting time with an alternative teacher. Fortunately for us Osada Steve who's been a student of Yukimura Haruki for many years offered to teach Yukimura Ryu in the time we had booked with Yukimura Sensei himself. In spite of the obvious sadness this caused we had a remarkable trip. As we left from our home in the UK we had mixed feelings about this trip. We had been looking forward to going for a long time. We were going to have a good time and yet it was overlayed with sadness that lent a melancholic feeling to the trip. It was going to be great, but we would miss seeing Yukimura Haruki, he was a tremendous old gentleman when he wasn't tying and we were looking forward to seeing him. It was not pleasant to know that we would in fact never see him again. The flight to Tokyo was a mixed one. [...]

Tokyo Japan in March 2016. The weather find, the cherry blossoms beginning to bloom. My memory of these events is at one and the same time vivid but probably incomplete due to the time elapsed since the trip and the killer jet lag that plagued me on the trip. If one thing all our travelling has taught me it's new strategies for dealing with jet lag and the importance of scheduling to account for it. I can't even begin to say how excited we were for this trip. We were going to see Yukimura Sensei and learn his style of kinbaku a little more. It was therefore with great sadness we learned of his passing the week before we were due to arrive. Yukimura Haruki is irreplaceable. So we didn't even think of getting time with an alternative teacher. Fortunately for us Osada Steve who's been a student of Yukimura Haruki for many years offered to teach Yukimura Ryu in the time we had booked with Yukimura Sensei himself. In spite of the obvious sadness this caused we had a remarkable trip. As we left from our home in the UK we had mixed feelings about this trip. We had been looking forward to going for a long time. We were going to have a good time and yet it was overlayed with sadness that lent a melancholic feeling to the trip. It was going to be great, but we would miss seeing Yukimura Haruki, he was a tremendous old gentleman when he wasn't tying and we were looking forward to seeing him. It was not pleasant to know that we would in fact never see him again. The flight to Tokyo was a mixed one. [...]

Memories of our great time at Bondage Expo Dallas in 2017. We had a great time tying, teaching and performing our brand of shibari bondage a great kinbaku performance and a fun shibari show to round off this event. We had a wonderful time meeting Nawashi Kanna for the first time. Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who makes this event so special to us.

It's always interesting starting a new shibari intensive, you never know what people are going to need to improve their rope bondage and it's a fascinating moment of discovery.
Lots of hard work to follow and people were showing real improvement by the end of the first day.

Well we had a great time in Charlottesville. We didn't get to see too much of the town but that's par for the course when we make these very short trips to teach and return home. In this intensive I added some things that I haven't been teaching before, my method TK, reverse prayer shibari and my version of the chest loading TK. I'd created the chest loading variant some years ago before going to Bound in Boston to teach and only showed it to one person while we were there (guess who). It was a little bit of a nervous moment for me, I've been working through various versions of my TK for several years refining it to make it do what I wanted aesthetically as well as structurally. It's been a big step for me to let it out in public officially. I'm really glad that people have received it so well. The next thing to be officially taught for the first time was my chest loading TK. I guess that some purists will have comments about this but I think it is something worth teaching. It's not something that's come up a lot but now that I've shown my solution to this problem which is quite different to the others so far seen it seems I should probably have been teaching it for a few years now. It got called a game changer from bottoms feeling the difference in it and I'm a bit mad at myself for not having taught it for the last few years. Feel free to ask for it in intensives from now on. The final new thing is my method reverse prayer shibari. Prior to deciding that [...]

I meant to blog about this event right after it happened and was frankly unforgivably lazy about blogging for the longest time. Now I've blogged about an event since the guilt pressure is finally high enough that I'm going to actually write this up. This was our first time in Vienna and our first time in Austria. Aside from the fact that we would get to see some of Vienna we were excited to see some friends for the first time in what seemed like ages. Wildties, Redsabbath, Saki Kamijoo and her model Mayumi Sumi. It's incredible to think that over the last couple of years we've met up with each other variously in London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Chicago and now Vienna. It frankly is incredible to think that this kind of thing now seems so perfectly natural. As usual I'm going to have to take a moment to mention the people that organise events like this. I have to say that they very probably do a better job than I could and we were well looked after being collected from the airport and well informed about everything that was going on. I especially have to say thank you to those that spared their time to show us round some of their magnificent city. It's really spectacular. But before that the festival itself. We were really pleased to be asked to open the festivals shows and the venue was great being in a brewery in the city. The bar section where the opening was held was dark and filled with old blackened wood. It provided a great setting for the opening and a great atmosphere for the performance with the audience close around [...]